I just listened to the incessant babbling of the world's greatest communicator and I kept waiting for someone to ask the question "what exactly are the republicans blocking?"

Let's face it. You got your stimulus

You got your healthcare

You got your Lily Ledbetter act

You got your cash for clunkers

You got your home buyers credit

You got your financial reform bill

You got your unemployment benefit extension

You got your Supreme Court justices

You just whipped out Stimulus Jr. on Monday. To my knowledge there's no sessions of congress even going on this week. Republicans haven't even had a chance to block that.

If republicans are blocking your causes, it seems to me that they're doing a pretty crappy job of it.

As a follow up, I would then ask when are all these great things you've already passed actually going to show results or how many years to we need to give you before you actually start to take responsibility for this economy.

Next weekend the Gekko's will take our semi annual trip up to Yellow Springs, OH for a Clifton Gorge Hike and/or bike ride along the trail and a trip to Young's Dairy.

If you have never been to Yellow Springs (the former home of Antioch College), you need to make the trek.

Yellow Springs is a miniature Berkeley with all kinds of lefties peddling their hemp products and art works. Many of the shop owners like to proudly display their "goods not produced in sweat shops"signs.

So I like to drive the lovely Mrs. Gekko nuts when she's buys a $100 piece of pottery by asking the owner, "I make my money from sweatshops, are you sure you want to take it?"

Somehow, they always manage to eat their hypocrisy and always take the credit card which, by the way, they never seem to be overly concerned that the credit card company is ripping me off with usury type interest rates or that they're trapping me in a mountain of consumer debt I'll never get out of.

The point of all this is. Left to it's own designs, communal living can not subsist on it's own. Yellow Springs cannot and will not survive selling their overpriced crap without an economy that gives people like me the resources to buy their crap.

All these leftist who want to ban big, bad, businesses have no comprehension that nearly everything in their possession exists because of the capitalist drive to make money. Where's that IPod if the Government tells Steve Jobs he needs to cough up 90 percent of his income in taxes?

Big business is what drives all economies and really it's what subsidizes that clown selling the $120 hemp sandals.

As those lefty businesses in Yellow Springs start to board up, maybe they'll start to get it.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class ...

... Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along -- unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

The Post's T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.

Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president's top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G's here or there. So he dropped out.

And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he'd be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who's supposed to know about handling everyone else's money. In the end this was excused by Washington's bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.

And under Geithner's expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama's very own White House owe the government they're allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.

The culture of entitlement on Capitol Hill is well illustrated by the news that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas, not only steered Congressional Black Caucus scholarship money to two of her grandsons and two of her great-nephews, but asked that the checks be sent directly to her relatives instead of to the schools.

Johnson represents a supremely Democratic district — D+23 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index — and thus is unlikely to see severe repercussions at the ballot box for this scandal.

But Georgia Democrat Sanford Bishop might. “Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) awarded three scholarships from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to his stepdaughter and wife’s niece between 2003 and 2005, according to records from the non-profit group.” The congressman’s defense is that because the no-relatives rule was not officially put in place until 2008, he technically broke no rules.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Texting or e-mailing while driving in Cincinnati soon will mean a $100 fine.

Six Cincinnati City Council members - a majority - voted Wednesday to ban "sending, reading or writing a text message or accessing the internet while driving."

The ban would go into effect 30 days after the full council approves it, which likely will be on Thursday.

Here's a memo to your average councilman/woman, we already have a law covering this and it's called reckless operation of a motor vehicle.

Look, I text once a week; usually to remind Midas that Coldplay sucks. So this law really doesn't impact me at all. None the less, here are some things I've witnessed, done or have friends that do that are at least as distracting as texting.

Screwing with CD'sGPSRolling a jointEatingShavingPutting on make upSwatting beesTalking to my ex wifeReading a newspaperPutting on make upCurling hair (No kidding. I knew a woman who had some kind of butane powered curling iron and she would curl her hair in traffic).Sex

I'll leave it to you to guess which of these I've done.

For sure, the whole texting thing is annoying. Just yesterday I was passed by a woman in a Volvo with a Baby on Board sign in the rear window all the while obviously texting while driving; clearly the behavior of your suburban liberal.

None the less, it's just one more "Yes Dear" law passed by a government that won't solve a real problem........ like a billion dollar pension liability.

The guys at Redstate have a letter signed off on by the who's who of congressional democrats to ask then President Bush (circa 2004) indicating that tightening home mortgage standards would pose a risk to affordable housing.

We write as members of the House of Representatives who continually press the GSEs to do more in affordable housing.

Until recently, we have been disappointed that the Administration has not been more supportive of our efforts to press the GSEs to do more. We have been concerned that the Administration's legislative proposal regarding the GSEs would weaken affordable housing performance by the GSEs, by emphasizing only safety and soundness. While the GSEs' affordable housing mission is not in any way incompatible with their safety and soundness, an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing.

How we lookin' now?

Maybe someone in the Northern Ohio media can ask Marcy Kaptur about her economic wisdom when she signed this letter.

A man is accused of operating a methamphetamine lab and growing marijuana near an elementary school.

Paul Bryant, 44, was booked into the Hamilton County jail about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday on multiple drug-related charges. He is scheduled to appear Thursday before a municipal court judge.

He was taken into custody shortly after Cincinnati police went to his home in the 3100 block of River Road Wednesday. Officers summoned a Hazmat team and Cincinnati firefighters as a suspected meth lab was dismantled.

Now during the 2008 presidential election, did Paul here vote for The One or the Maverick?

A senior aide for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was arrested Tuesday for attempting to bring marijuana into the Hart Senate Office Building, according to U.S. Capitol Police reports.

Marcus Stanley, who served as a senior economic adviser and at one time worked on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — chaired by Boxer — was stopped by a police officer Tuesday morning when he allegedly tried to “remove and conceal” a leafy green substance from his pocket during a security screening at the Constitution Avenue door of the Hart building around noon, according to a Capitol Police report.

I continue to be amazed at the number of fully functional professional who insist on smoking the tree. Seriously, is the buzz so awesome that your willing to give up a job for it?

I smoke my fair share of weed as a kid and I guess I just got tired of talking about Pink Floyd while the buzz was good it just seemed more like a been there done that kind of thing. A three beer buzz seems to be a more logical, and legal way to go.

Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats' efforts to trumpet their signature achievement before the midterm elections.

Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.

These and other insurers say Congress's landmark refashioning of U.S. health coverage, which passed in March after a brutal fight, is causing them to pass on more costs to consumers than Democrats predicted.

The rate increases largely apply to policies for individuals and small businesses and don't include people covered by a big employer or Medicare.

In many respects, the way the Obamunists economic policies are more nefarious than socialism. See, in socialist economies, the government runs the business and is accountable to it's customers. If the service sucks they hold the government is responsible.

The way the obamunist system work, the state ties the hands of profit making businesses with endless regulation and taxes then makes them the straw man when the consumer starts to bitch.

Then they get to regulate them even more until they ultimately take the whole sector over.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

A protest over the fatal police shooting of a Guatemalan immigrant turned violent when some demonstrators threw bottles at officers, set trash cans on fire and refused to disperse.

Television news footage showed people tossing the bottles and plastic crates at officers in riot gear late Monday near MacArthur Park, a neighborhood with a large Central American population west of downtown.

Police declared the protest an unlawful assembly around 10 p.m. and ordered the dozens of protesters to disperse. The majority of the crowd cleared out, but a small number lingered and caused trouble, police spokesman Gregory Baek said.

Police made a couple of arrests, Baek said. He said police won't have a final tally until they complete the booking process for the suspects.

The protest began in the afternoon with demonstrators marching back and forth between a bustling shopping area where the shooting occurred and the Rampart police station three blocks away.

Police said three bicycle officers were patrolling the area Sunday when someone flagged them down and said a man was threatening passers-by with a knife.

When officers confronted the man, they ordered him to drop the knife but he refused, Lt. Andrew Neiman said.

"Instead, he came after the officers with a knife raised in the air, leading one of the officers to fire at the suspect," Neiman said.

Long Island Rep. Carolyn McCarthy got thousands of dollars in campaign checks from a lobbyist and his son who've since been charged with funneling illegal cash to politicians.

At the same time the money was pouring in, McCarthy sponsored millions of taxpayer dollars in congressional "earmarks" for some of the lobbyist's clients, records show.

Since 2007, the Long Island Democrat has steered $4.3 million to two clients of the now-defunct PMA Group, a lobbying firm that employed the recently indicted Paul Magliocchetti and his son, Mark.

The Magliocchettis were charged Aug. 4 for what federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., say were illegal campaign contributions made from at least 2003 through 2008.

Paul Magliocchetti has pleaded not guilty. Mark Magliochetti has pleaded guilty to one count of making illegal donations. He admitted that he routinely acted as a conduit for donations made by others to Congress members - an illegal tactic aimed at hiding the true source of the money.

Hey, I know the 800 billion the feds spent on the stimulus was supposed get people back to work by funding all those "shovel ready" jobs.

But I guess they were off by 50 billion........

Vowing to find new ways to stimulate the sputtering economy, President Barack Obama will call for long-term investments in the nation's roads, railways and runways that would cost at least $50 billion.

The infrastructure investments are one part of a package of targeted proposals the White House is expected to announce in hopes of jump-starting the economy ahead of the November election. Obama will outline the infrastructure proposal Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

While the proposal calls for investments over six years, the White House said spending would be front-loaded with an initial $50 billion to help create jobs in the near future.

The goals of the infrastructure plan include: rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads; constructing and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, enough to go coast-to-coast; and rehabilitating or reconstructing 150 miles of airport runways, while also installing a new air navigation system designed to reduce travel times and delays.

Just one question for Obama and Co. Where the hell was the funding for all this shit 2 years ago?

If you were to listen to CBS Evening news, you would probably believe that you will find racial intolerance at your local tea party.

In fact, can you name me one instance in "Redville" where you'll find this kind of racial hatred.........

Duong Nghe Ly can't wait to begin his senior year at South Philadelphia High School. A day of violence there last year changed his life, and he wants to learn if his school has been transformed as well.

Last Dec. 3, after years of attacks on Asian immigrant students, something finally snapped.

Fueled by rumors, a group of students roamed the halls searching for Asian victims until one was attacked in a classroom. Later, about 70 students stormed the cafeteria, where several Asians were beaten. About 35 students pushed past a police officer onto the so-called "Asian floor," but were turned back. After school, Asians being escorted home were attacked anyway by a mob of youths.

Almost all the attackers were black - but few observers believe the violence was due to racial hatred. Instead, they cite isolation of different groups within the school, certain students' warped "gangster" values, and for some, simmering resentments over perceived benefits for Asian students.

About 30 Asians were injured that day; seven went to hospitals. Past attacks had been reported to administrators and police, but students say nothing seemed to change.

First, can you believe the line "Almost all the attackers were black - but few observers believe the violence was due to racial hatred."

Huh?

You have one group identified by racial context targeting another but it's not due to racial hatred? Just how stupid does the writer believe we are.

Second, can anyone name me one episode where something this dramatic has happened in a "Redville" school. You know, the alleged home of racial intolerance.